You will now receive updates fromAM & PM Update Newsletter

AM & PM Update Newsletter

After a year of this he devised a cunning plan. He looked at the ladder and saw the bottom side had not won a game and was flogged every week.

So when he was asked the inevitable he would answer: ''Hawthorn.''

It was a conversation stopper. A bit like being asked, ''How's your wife?'' to be told she was beheaded in a train wreck.

Flash forward a few years and Fred joins lifelong Hawk supporter Mick Miller in the special duties gaming branch.

After knocking off a few SP bookmakers they would head to Glenferrie Oval for the last quarter. That was enough. Soon Fred was hooked and became a rusted-on supporter, which has become a family tradition.

Since then the Hawks have won 10 flags, and today have the chance to grab an 11th.

So thank goodness he did not wait another year to pick the wooden spooners, or we would have been stuck with Melbourne.

Our own football career was modest. Slow, skinny and frightened was never the ideal combination to interest recruiters.

But our claim to fame has always been the subtle strategies of the game. It began in the late 1960s when, as a 12-year-old playing coach, we urged our First Preston Scouts side to handball and play on at all costs to overcome a much bigger team in a lightning premiership.

A few years later, in the 1970 grand final, Ron Barassi, then Carlton coach, used the same game plan to beat Collingwood.

Barassi's first junior side was Preston Scouts, leading us to believe he stole the strategy. He got a statue at the MCG. We got zip-a-dee-doo-dah.

At last week's preliminary final, we sat in a Hawk bay among the true believers. We saw Greg Cook, the son of the revered club secretary, Ron, an official who helped drag Hawthorn from a basket case to a powerhouse.

We saw a middle-aged man whose family has donated more than $1 million to keep Hawthorn afloat when it was sinking in debt. He could easily join the suits behind glass, but prefers to sit in the outer wearing his prized Hawk jumper with the junior Rioli's number 33 on the back.

We also saw a board member who understands that despite the hype, footy is not brain surgery. And he should know, because that's what he does for a living. Last year when we asked the neurosurgeon Professor Andrew Kaye whether he would be going to the game that Friday night, he said he had given his tickets away because he was due in the operating theatre and did not want any referred pressure to finish early.

Near midnight he rang the president, Jeff Kennett, for a ball-by-ball description. It was a good result - Hawthorn won and the patient survived.

The professor's brother, Justice Stephen Kaye, is another mad keen Hawk, so much so that the Supreme Court judge has banned himself from games for fear his own eyeballs will burst if he witnesses just one more dodgy free kick.

We go to many games with 3AW breakfast identity Ross Stevenson, who can remember players' numbers back to the 1960s. Clearly, he needs to get out more.

He is a man who can interview prime ministers and everyday punters without his pulse rate changing, yet at the football we see other personality traits. He alternates between Winston Churchill planning Operation Overlord and a 10-year-old who has skoled a bottle of red cordial and then swallowed a helium balloon.

That is football. Every one of us has a story of how we ended up supporting ''our'' team in what usually becomes a lifelong contract.

For many fans there is an invisible and unbreakable bond between the club they may never have visited and players they have never met. The emotion of supporters constantly surprises the people within, who treat it as a business and a sports science.

They prize cool heads. We embrace manic passion.

There can be no greater example than the 1996 grass-roots revolt against plans to merge Hawthorn with Melbourne. The board of the day had no choice but to recommend the move as the club was heading to insolvency. Then a few of us met at the past player's rooms at the request of a former premiership captain, Don Scott, to explore alternatives. When your columnist was asked to provide a name for a supporter-based recovery mission we suggested Operation Payback. And so it was to be.

At the final meeting at the Camberwell Civic Centre we saw firsthand what footy fans think of ''their'' club.

As a board member tried to explain the financial reality to the baying crowd, a well-dressed middle-aged lady about 10 rows from the front interjected: ''Why don't you fix it?''

When the board member responded, ''Why don't you, sweetheart?'' she fired back: ''Why don't you go and get f-----!''

The shocked look on her own face graphically showed she had not as much even thought such a cuss word, let alone expressed it in public. If Hawthorn today win the cup it will initially be held aloft by coach Alastair Clarkson and captain Luke Hodge. But make no mistake, the invisible fingerprints of Don Scott and former president Ian Dicker will be all over it because without them there would be no Hawthorn.

Football is now a multimillion-dollar industry. There are marketing segments, multimedia departments and more reporters covering AFL than federal politics.

But it cannot be reduced to win-loss ratios, cups in the cupboard, or dollars in the bank. Somehow this sport has become part of the spirit of our society, and we are better for it.

It is a social lubricant, a common interest you can share with friends and strangers. We are all pathetically and hopelessly equal, yelling at an event we cannot possibly alter.

We wear lucky scarves, socks or undies in the hope the weather and the bounce of the ball will be kind. We scream at the umpires with as much effect as a wolf howling at the moon.

Those who talk of the good old days are kidding themselves. It was no place for women, unless they had won a couple of three-rounders at Festival Hall.

We remember the suburban terraces, where toothless idiots drinking gutfuls of heavy beer would yell racist taunts at the very few non-Anglo-Saxons who took the field.

And Hawthorn was one of the last clubs to recognise indigenous talent. There was an unspoken code: ''They're flashy, but will go missing in the big ones.''

Last week when Hawthorn was headed in the last few minutes by Adelaide and heading to oblivion, a bloke on the half-back flank took it on himself to go into the centre square for the next bounce to single-handedly stop the rot. His name was Shaun Burgoyne, and he kicked to a bloke in the goal square who won the game. His name was Cyril Rioli. At least the traditionalist can take solace in the fact that he is a Scotch College boy.

At another game the bloke next to us turned to marvel at the amazing talents of Buddy Franklin. His name was Peter Hudson, who knows a little about the goalkicking caper.

When we leave Naked City Towers (otherwise known as Media House) to walk to the MCG for a night game, we pass cafes and restaurants where supporters of opposing clubs sit and chat amicably.

Fans don't need to be segregated, the crowds are usually passionate but good-humoured, and violence is negligible.

Tomorrow supporters from all clubs will wake up with one thought: ''I wonder who we will draft for next year?''